Wideband communications networks are established by network providers to allow communication between a customer's sites. For example, a customer may have a network 46 established between a single-tenanted building 40 and a multi-tenanted building 30 in different cities, to establish a corporate virtual local area network (VLAN), as shown in FIG. 1. The network 46 may comprise a wideband internet protocol (IP) core 44, linked to the buildings with optical fibre, and interfaced through network switches 32, 34 to customer premises equipment (CPE) 36,42. The cost to the customer will depend upon the bandwidth of the network connection between the sites. In general, customers will want to keep the bandwidth provisioned to their network as low as practical to minimise costs. However, there may be an occasional need for increased bandwidth to support high throughput applications.
In existing networks, customers may request additional bandwidth from the network provider by informing a customer service representative. After the request is approved, it is passed to network personnel who reconfigure the network to allocate the required bandwidth to the customer's network. However, this process may not occur rapidly enough to meet the customer's needs. Moreover, the customer may only need the additional bandwidth for a short period of time, possibly even as little as several minutes. The high cost of the extra bandwidth makes it desirable to be able to reduce the allocated bandwidth after the customer's short-term needs have been satisfied. It is desired, therefore, to provide a system for controlling the bandwidth allocated to a network connection, or at least a useful alternative to existing systems.